1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and system for providing digital rights management (DRM) files using caching that can more rapidly display DRM files by initially decoding a portion of the DRM files to be displayed in a display area, and by subsequently decoding remaining DRM files upon demand.
2. Discussion of the Background
As the use of mobile terminals to execute content previously executed by discrete components, such as MPEG 3 players (MP3 players), game consoles, and computers, increases, industries providing such content have become more active. Content may be provided by mobile terminals to mobile terminal users in various ways such as background screens, ring sounds, MP3 files, moving image files, games, and the like, and consumer demand for content continues to increase. However, some users acquire right-protected content by downloading it illegally or without authorization from the rights-holder, such as via a peer-to-peer (P2P) server, instead of downloading content legally or with full authorization.
Therefore, to reduce this problem, content providers are protecting content by using digital rights management (DRM). DRM is an abbreviation of digital rights management, and refers to management for digital rights, including copyrights. That is, the DRM is to protect contents providers' rights and reduces the illegal or unauthorized use of content. DRM files refer to files that are encoded according to a DRM technique.
However, DRM files may need to be decoded prior to use since files adopting the DRM are generally encoded. According to the conventional decoding of DRM files, completely decoding DRM files stored in a memory may take a longer time than desired by a user, and may occupy significant device resources during the decoding time.
FIG. 1 is a flowchart illustrating a conventional method for providing DRM files in a mobile terminal.
As illustrated in FIG. 1, when the mobile terminal receives a request for a DRM file list from a user, a number of DRM files are identified in operation S110, and the identified DRM files are decoded in operation S120.
In this example, the number of DRM files is N. Thus, the mobile terminal decodes the N DRM files through the iteration of operation S120 and operation S130, stores the decoded N DRM files in a memory unit in operation S140, and displays the stored N DRM files to the file list in operation S150.
If one thousand DRM files are stored, the mobile terminal initially decodes all one thousand DRM files and provides the decoded DRM file list. Consequently, the decoding step may take time, such as a few minutes, to decode all one thousand DRM files. Further, as a number of DRM files increases, decoding time also increases. Also, the user of the mobile terminal may be required to wait until all DRM files are decoded before viewing the DRM file list. A new technique is desired to reduce the above described disadvantages of the conventional art.